If you have more than just one computer in your home and your media content is spread on all of the systems, at some point you might have encountered the problem of wanting to access some media on a computer that was used at that moment by another member of your family. If you want to do something to avoid this issue in the future you might want to consider buying a large hard drive and move it from one computer to the other in order to grab all of the media.
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After doing this, you should head down to your Mac computer and launch iTunes. Once you do this, the software is going to ask you to either create a new library or choose an existing one. What you have to do is create a new library and give it a name. After doing this you might want to save it to your user account’s Music folder.

Now, go to the Preferences menu in iTunes and select Advanced > Change and then go to the Media folder that you just created on your external HDD. My advice is to disable the Copy Files To iTunes Media Folder When Adding To Library but remember to leave the Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized activated. You now must click on the OK button in order to dismiss the Preferences window. Your next step should Choose File > Add To Library and after that go to the Media folder located on your external HDD and after that click on Open. iTunes will now add names to all of your media content found on that hard drive to the iTunes Library window without moving the files. As you would expect, this can take a long time if you have a lot of content stored on the HDD. You might want to know that depending from where you got the media, during this process some of the media will be misfiled. For this reason, it is highly recommended that you look thoroughly in your media and do any necessary reorganizing. Don’t forget about erasing the duplicate content as if you leave it, this content will occupy unnecessary space on your hard drive. You might want to know that in iTunes you get a Display Duplicate function which unfortunately is not very helpful. However, if you press & hold the Option button, the command is going to change to Find Exact Duplicates which will find more duplicates, but even so it’s far from being perfect. The ideal situation would be to have no duplicates at all or at least only a few of them which can be erased manually.

There’s also a third party application that can take care of your duplicates which is called Dupin and it will set you back $15. This program adopts an iTunes-like UI and can find the duplicates in your iTunes library or it can search for them in certain areas, like Movies, Music and TV Shows.

You might not know this but the Tab key is one of the most versatile buttons on your keyboard as it has several tricks up its sleeve about which we shall talk about in this article.
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The first thing that you can do with the Tab button is to choose items alphabetically in Finder windows. What you have to do is go into one of the Finder windows, with the exception of the Column view and you can press the Tab button for alphabetically selecting the next file.

Of course, this only works if the window has been sorted by another way than the name (Kind or Size, for example). By pressing the Tab key you can go to the next alphabetical item, while pressing Shift-Tab will direct you to the previous alphabetic file. We should mention that this is going to work also when the items have been grouped in categories with the View > Arrange By sub-menu. Pressing the Tab key will jump to a different group.In Safari you can easily navigate by just using the keyboard. If you press the Tab button it will redirect you from the address field to the browser’s search field, as well as to any other fill-in fields that are in the webpage. You should know that Safari features its proprietary setting for tabbing to other elements which are not fields. You have to access Preferences and from there go to the Advanced tab and choose the option called Press Tab To Highlight Each Item On A Webpage. You are also able to leave this off and just use the Option key when you hit the Tab key for accessing this capability temporarily.If you go to the Keyboard Preferences and activate the All Controls option which can be found in the heading called Full Keyboard Access. When it is on, at first you’ll have to activate the address field in Safari (Command-L) or the search field (Command-Option-L) for focusing its attention on the title bar. After an item has been selected, you can activate it by pressing the spacebar. After the menu has been activated, for opening it you’ll have to hit the spacebar or you can use arrow keys for highlighting an item. By pressing Return it will choose an item, while pressing the spacebar is going to close the menu without making any selections.

You will find an Outline view in Apple’s Pages ’09 as well as in Microsoft Word which gives you the possibility to collapse a long document into headings of various levels which are easier to review. When you are in Outline view, you might want to click the text cursor where you want in a heading and after that hit the Tab key in order to demote it to a lower-level heading, while pressing Shift-Tab is going to promote the heading a level up. In Adobe programs, you have the possibility of hiding tool palettes by doing a simple press of the Tab button while an additional press of the Tab key is going to bring back all of the tool palettes. We should mention that if you are in a text box, you’ll first have to hit the Esc key for deselecting it because otherwise the Tab key is going to be typed in the text.

If you are using a Mac in a business environment, you might want to know that Apple offers a wide range of office tools and in this article you will find several management tools for IT organizations.
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The first one we would like to talk about is Centrify Direct Control which can be considered as a solid alternative to the Active Directory plug-in provided by Apple. You might want to know that there’s a free version available called Centrify Express, but the powerful solution would have to be the commercial version which can integrate with the Active Directory for extending the schema in a safe way in order to permit administrators to apply group policies. These policies are mirroring the ones that Apple can provide in the Managed Preferences and can be considered just as scalable as other ones. We also have to mention that Direct Control has smartcard support for Mac OS X Lion.

We continue with JAMF Casper Suite that is an Apple-specific solution that is integrated with the company’s global enterprise support services. It manages to provide full lifecycle management, including here system deployments, inventory/asset management, software control and auditing, patch management and software rollouts, along with remote control for end-use support. If you haven’t heard of LANDesk before, you should know that this is a lifecycle management and multiplatform systems suite that supports Microsoft Windows OS X and Linux as well. It offers support for software discovery and distribution, patch management, centralizer security & anti-virus services, help desk functionality and several device management possibilities. Another important alternative to the Active Directory plug-in would have to be Thursby’s ADmitMac which has numerous advanced features, like DFS browsing support for those Macs that are running on an older version of the operating system. In addition, it provides smartcard support for Lion. With AdmitMac, the administrators have the possibility to tap into the Manager Preferences architecture from Apple without OS X Server. It does this by hosting client management data on a network share. Not only for Macs but also for Windows-running computers, you can use FileWave which if you did not know is a software deployment & management tool which makes it easier for you to install & remove apps with the help of a central management interface. It works just about the same as those installations based on packets, but you are able to remove software and also perform updates very easily. You could also consider Flexera which can provide license and software management solutions. For the computers running on Mac it has support for license management, auditing and software distribution. These features are also supported in Windows and Unix environments. A multi-platform IT automation suite is Puppet which is great as a Mac management tool as it provides remote discovery for your Mac system and configuration. Puppet can also support private and public cloud management as well as policy compliance solutions.

Regarding Absolute Manage, this would have to be a handy suite which focuses mostly on full lifecycle management for Macs, PCs and iOS-running devices. For Macs it has support for monolithic system imaging, inventory/asset management, patch management, software deployment, security/system change management and license management as well. Last but certainly not least, Quest gives you a wide array of enterprise management solutions like Exchange, Active Directory, network security and server & cloud virtualization. For Macs it has a Group Policy that extends Active Directory just like Centrify’s Direct Control.